Pointing Out the Shortcomings of Relation Extraction Models with Semantically Motivated Adversarials

Gennaro Nolano, Moritz Blum, Basil Ell, Philipp Cimiano


Abstract
In recent years, large language models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various NLP tasks. However, investigations have shown that these models tend to rely on shortcut features, leading to inaccurate predictions and causing the models to be unreliable at generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. For instance, in the context of relation extraction (RE), we would expect a model to identify the same relation independently of the entities involved in it. For example, consider the sentence “Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa” expressing the created(Leonardo_da_Vinci, Mona_Lisa) relation. If we substiute “Leonardo da Vinci” with “Barack Obama”, then the sentence still expresses the created relation. A robust model is supposed to detect the same relation in both cases. In this work, we describe several semantically-motivated strategies to generate adversarial examples by replacing entity mentions and investigate how state-of-the-art RE models perform under pressure. Our analyses show that the performance of these models significantly deteriorates on the modified datasets (avg. of -48.5% in F1), which indicates that these models rely to a great extent on shortcuts, such as surface forms (or patterns therein) of entities, without making full use of the information present in the sentences.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1121
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
12809–12820
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1121
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gennaro Nolano, Moritz Blum, Basil Ell, and Philipp Cimiano. 2024. Pointing Out the Shortcomings of Relation Extraction Models with Semantically Motivated Adversarials. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 12809–12820, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Pointing Out the Shortcomings of Relation Extraction Models with Semantically Motivated Adversarials (Nolano et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1121.pdf